Wednesday, April 23, 2014

- Proclaim austerity for the public schools,
while continuing to expand charters.

- Put non-educators in positions of power, from
Assistant Principal on up.

- Maintain a climate of scapegoating and witch
hunting for “bad teachers,” who are posited as the cause of poverty and student
failure, doing everything possible to keep debate from addressing systemic
inequities.

- Neutralize and eventually eliminate teacher
unions (the former largely accomplished in the case of the AFT). As part of
that process, eliminate tenure, seniority and defined benefit pensions.

- Create and maintain a climate of constant
disruption and destabilization, with cascading mandates that are impossible to
keep up or comply with.

- Create teacher evaluations based on Common
Core-related high stakes tests for which no curriculum has been developed.
Arbitrarily impose cut scores on those exams that cast students, teachers and
schools as failing, as was done by NYS Education Commissioner John King and
Regent Meryl Tisch.

- Get teachers and administrators, whether
through extortion (see RttT funding) threats or non-stop propaganda, to accept
the premises of “data-driven” everything, even when that data is irrelevant,
opaque, contradictory, or just plain wrong.

- Get everyone to internalize the premises and
language of so-called education reform:

–
Parents are not citizens with rights, but “customers” who are provided“choices”
that are in practice restricted by the decisions of those in charge, based
on policies developed by an educational-industrial complex made up of
foundations, McKinsey-type consultants and captive academics.

–
Students are “assets” and “products,” whose value is to be enhanced (see
the definition of VAM) by teachers before being offered to employers.

–
Teachers are fungible units of “human capital,” to be deployed as policy-makers
and management see fit. Since human capital depreciates over time,it
needs to be replaced by fresh capital, branded as “the Best and Brightest.”

– Schools are part of an investment
“portfolio,” explicitly including the real estatethey
inhabit, and are subject to the “demands” of the market and the preferences
of policy-makers and management.

- Create an intimidating, punitive environment,
where the questions and qualms of teachers are either disregarded or responded
to with threats.

- Get the university education programs on
board under threat of continuing attack. Once they acquiesce, go after them
anyway, and deregulate the teacher licensing process so that it’s easier to
hire temps.

- Eliminate instruction that is deemed
irrelevant to the most narrowly-cast labor market needs of employers, getting
rid of art, music, dance, electives, etc., thereby reducing the focus of
education to preparation for passive acceptance of low-wage employment.

- Embed software and electronic gadgets in
every facet of the classroom and school, from reading to test taking, with the
intention of automating/digitizing as much classroom input and output as
possible.

- Use the automation/digitiliztion of the
classroom to enlarge class size – something explicitly promoted by Bill Gates –
and transform teachers into overseers of student digital production that is
connected to massive databases, so that every keystroke is data that can be
potentially monetized.

- Proclaim austerity for the public schools,
while continuing to expand charters.

- Put non-educators in positions of power, from
Assistant Principal on up.

- Maintain a climate of scapegoating and witch
hunting for “bad teachers,” who are posited as the cause of poverty and student
failure, doing everything possible to keep debate from addressing systemic
inequities.

- Neutralize and eventually eliminate teacher
unions (the former largely accomplished in the case of the AFT). As part of
that process, eliminate tenure, seniority and defined benefit pensions.

- Create and maintain a climate of constant
disruption and destabilization, with cascading mandates that are impossible to
keep up or comply with.

- Create teacher evaluations based on Common
Core-related high stakes tests for which no curriculum has been developed.
Arbitrarily impose cut scores on those exams that cast students, teachers and
schools as failing, as was done by NYS Education Commissioner John King and
Regent Meryl Tisch.

- Get teachers and administrators, whether
through extortion (see RttT funding) threats or non-stop propaganda, to accept
the premises of “data-driven” everything, even when that data is irrelevant,
opaque, contradictory, or just plain wrong.

- Get everyone to internalize the premises and
language of so-called education reform:

–
Parents are not citizens with rights, but “customers” who are provided“choices”
that are in practice restricted by the decisions of those in charge, based
on policies developed by an educational-industrial complex made up of
foundations, McKinsey-type consultants and captive academics.

–
Students are “assets” and “products,” whose value is to be enhanced (see
the definition of VAM) by teachers before being offered to employers.

–
Teachers are fungible units of “human capital,” to be deployed as policy-makers
and management see fit. Since human capital depreciates over time,it
needs to be replaced by fresh capital, branded as “the Best and Brightest.”

– Schools are part of an investment
“portfolio,” explicitly including the real estatethey
inhabit, and are subject to the “demands” of the market and the preferences
of policy-makers and management.

- Create an intimidating, punitive environment,
where the questions and qualms of teachers are either disregarded or responded
to with threats.

- Get the university education programs on
board under threat of continuing attack. Once they acquiesce, go after them
anyway, and deregulate the teacher licensing process so that it’s easier to
hire temps.

- Eliminate instruction that is deemed
irrelevant to the most narrowly-cast labor market needs of employers, getting
rid of art, music, dance, electives, etc., thereby reducing the focus of
education to preparation for passive acceptance of low-wage employment.

- Embed software and electronic gadgets in
every facet of the classroom and school, from reading to test taking, with the
intention of automating/digitizing as much classroom input and output as
possible.

- Use the automation/digitiliztion of the
classroom to enlarge class size – something explicitly promoted by Bill Gates –
and transform teachers into overseers of student digital production that is
connected to massive databases, so that every keystroke is data that can be
potentially monetized.

Top Secret Correspondence

Quoteworthy

At this point, the only reason left to support this President, is that he reflects your hateful heart; he shares your contempt of people of color, your hostility toward outsiders, your toxic misogyny, your ignorant bigotry, your feeling of supremacy.

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Views expressed herein are solely those of the author or authors, and do not reflect views of my employers, the United Federation of Teachers, or any UFT union caucus.

Stories herein containing unnamed or invented characters are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.